Training bees

The basis for the “training” of bees is the teaching of IP Pavlov on the influence of the food stimulus on the physiological reactions of animals, that is, on the creation of a corresponding conditioned reflex.

Reflex is the body’s response to irritation.

Agronomists have been observed that, despite the large amount of nectar in the flowers of a meadow clover, the bees visit it weakly. Experiments were conducted on the use of various bee breeds in pollination of meadow clover. It is determined that gray mountain Caucasian bees are more willing to visit flowers of meadow clover in the first days of their delivery to the pollinated area. This is explained by the fact that the gray mountain Caucasian bees, in comparison with others, have a somewhat greater proboscis, which corresponds to the length of the corolla of the clover. Then, with each passing day, the bees switched more and more to more affordable competing melliferous plants, and the results of the pollination of the clover were lower than desired.

As a result of the research, a well-known beekeeper scientist proposed the so-called method of “training” bees on sparsely populated crops, in particular, on a clover meadow. The essence of the training is as follows: the flowers are separated from the sepals and placed in a closed glass vessel with a warm sugar syrup. Early in the morning, before the flight of bees, a syrup infused overnight is fed to 100 g of each bee family. Feeded bees fly out of the hive and search for a source of bribe, corresponding to the smell of syrup.

The beekeeper suggested that bees be trained on honey as they were immersed in a drinking bowl for flowers of plants.

Bees will soon start pollination of plant flowers if they are brought close to the massif. To ensure that bees do not switch to visiting the better honey-plants, training is conducted daily during

the flowering period of the pollinated culture. There is an exception to this rule. Thus, the saturated pollination of apple trees, according to recent data, is undesirable and requires regulation of the work of bees. If the bee colonies are removed from the pollinated culture, the training of the bees does not yield results. Bees, taking a flavored syrup from the trough, will produce a circular dance, indicating that the source of the feed is somewhere close.

They will actively fly out of the hive in search of a bribe, but without finding it, return empty to the hive. Individual bees will still find flowers that give the smell of syrup, but due to the remoteness and low availability of nectar, mobilization dance will not be.

In the greenhouses there is a weak years of bees on cloudy January and partly February days. The length of the day of the central regions of the country at this time is 7-9 hours. Many days are overcast, and only sometimes at noon the sun will glimpse, when the process of photosynthesis and respiration in plants equals. In the rest of the time, the greenhouse plant lives at the expense of previously accumulated substances. Plants are extremely depressed and nectar is not isolated. To insist on syrup on flowers that do not have nectar is pointless. Attempts to pollute the flowers manually to obtain super-early cucumbers did not yield results. Ovary due to insufficient photosynthesis did not develop.

In March-April, when the plants in the greenhouses were in the best conditions for growth and fruiting, the bees were treated with a syrup infused with male cucumber flowers. It was necessary to find out whether the syrup that is present on male cucumber flowers has an advantage over ordinary sugar syrup.

In the experiment, 15 bee colonies were used, which were divided into 3 groups (5 families each). One group of bees for 1-1.5 hours before the summer was fed 50-100 g of syrup, flavored on male flowers of cucumbers, the other – in the same amount of ordinary sugar syrup, the third group was a control. All the bee colonies receiving supplementary feeding, regardless of its quality, were more active in seeking a bribe. Years of bees by flowers increased by an average of 50-60%. When feeding bees syrup, infusions on male flowers, the attendance of mostly male flowers increased. Probably, this is because the syrup gets the smell of the tissues of male flowers, which differ from the smell of women.

The next day, the effect of training on bees did not affect, and everything depended on the presence of nectar and pollen in flowers. Thus, our observations differed from the accepted recommendation of the training of bees in greenhouses on the smell of nectar of cucumbers. Before speaking on this issue in the press, the experiments were repeated many times, eliminating the obstacles that could affect the experience. At the same time, there was a suspicion that the bees were not ahead of us in collecting nectar. To block the bees from the way to the flowers, they acted as follows: in the evening, the male flowers, which should blossom tomorrow, were isolated with gauze. In the morning the flowers blossomed, but for the bees they were inaccessible throughout the day. By the evening, these flowers were collected in a sufficient quantity for training, separated from the green mass and immersed in a warm sugar syrup at a concentration of 1: 1. And in this case, the effect of flavored syrup on visiting female flowers was similar to the effect of ordinary sugar feeding. Yes, this is understandable, since cucumbers are a weak honey in comparison with meadow clover, where the bees take only a small part of the nectar because of the length of the corolla that does not correspond to their proboscis.

Despite the high agrotechnics cultivation of greenhouse cucumbers, their honey production is 2-3 times less than the honey productivity of cucumbers of open ground.

We determined the honey production of cucumbers of varieties Marfinsky multi-breed and hybrid VIR-40 in conditions of gravel growing in a greenhouse with the area of ​​600 m2. On average, 7610 male and 914 female flowers bloomed during the day (from March 20 to July 9). The average daily allocation of nectar in transferring to honey was about 8 g. This, of course, is not much, but the average attendance of female cucumber flowers before the start of the bee’s flight outside the greenhouse exceeded 20 times the repetition.

The question of training bees is important because along with winter and spring greenhouses, the area under the so-called film greenhouses increases every year. For a number of reasons that do not depend on the work of the beekeeper, the bees in them are quickly lost, which complicates and increases the cost of pollination. With the skillful attraction of bees from the central apiary or from neighboring greenhouses to film greenhouses, there is no need to put bee colonies in the bottom.

In search of a reliable way to send bees to cucumbers in film greenhouses, we turned to known works. Determining one of the reasons for the poor visiting of the remote clover site, he established the following. Receiving the syrup from the trough placed on top of the nest or on the apiary, the bees that took it; feed, through the “dance” notify the bees sitting on the honeycomb about the proximity of the bribe. Departing bees are looking for him near the hive and do not find it. To achieve the goal, in the Moscow region under experimental farming, upon recommendation, individual bee families were given flavored sugar top dressing and at the same time on the apiary there were honeycomb filled with sugar syrup infused with clover flowers. When a sufficient number of bees were gathered on a honeycomb, they were put in a portable box and carried to a plot of meadow clover for 800 m.

More reliable results will be if the honeycombs or portable boxes with honeycombs filled with flavored syrup are placed one by one in the direction of the pollinated culture, that is, the box or cell nearest to the apiary is rearranged for the last, and so gradually, but surely bees will be sent; to the pollinated array.

We conducted a production experience to establish the need for hives and bees to be put into unheated film greenhouses with a cucumber culture. Controls were greenhouses in which bees were used. In the experimental greenhouses the bees were guided by training 4 bee colonies located in the apiary and in a winter greenhouse at a distance of 100 to 500 m. Each family was given 20-30 g of sugar syrup flavored with anise oil each morning. In addition, drops of this syrup were applied to open transoms of greenhouses and flowers. It was observed that increasing the doses of feeding bees to a flavored syrup increases the activity of bees in search of a bribe.

Increasing the doses of syrup in greenhouses by setting up feeders or a honeycomb, as well as applying drops on the flowers, especially on the first day, intensifies the years of bees. The following days, the syrup was given less. The bees developed a conditioned reflex and they willingly visited flowers without training.

Anise oil can be successfully replaced with dried lemon balm, cats, mint and honey. By directing the bees into the greenhouses, it is necessary to strictly monitor that the transoms open in a timely manner and on the same side. Otherwise, the orientation of the bees will be disturbed, which can reduce the attendance of flowers.

In unheated film greenhouses cucumbers begin to bloom in early June, which coincides with the usual cooling. The temperature in the greenhouses at this time is close to the outside. And regardless of whether there are bees in the greenhouses or not, they do not visit flowers.

The staging of bees in unheated film greenhouses is more psychological than practical. Convince masters of greenhouses in this can be gradual, comparing the output of greenhouses with bees and without them.

With insignificant removal of film greenhouses from the apiary or winter greenhouses that have the bees flying to freedom, the distance of no more than 500 m should be placed in spring and summer in them inappropriate. In this case, it is possible to provide saturated pollination of plants in greenhouses (in film) by training bees on a culture with the addition of a by-product odor (essential oils).

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